Out of the blue, recently some people launched a token exchange they called Veil, and at the same time launched their utility token they also called Veil, which then listed on a couple of well-known ERC-20 token swap exchanges. Somehow, despite having a huge token supply and not being a privacy coin, or a coin at all, their so-called Veil has been fairly closely tracking our Veil price, which multiplied by their huge supply gives a crazy high “market capitalisation” given that they just appeared out of nowhere a few weeks ago. It is necessary for this to be mentioned here in the official Veil blog, as it is continually creating confusion that has had to be addressed every day on Discord and Telegram channels, and on 𝕏 (Twitter).
veil-wallet.ios.ipa
file from the above Github releases page can be “side-loaded” to your iPhone or iPad.If the community actively proposes and completes bounty tasks, then you will find them available.
Letting you know about this might make the faucet funds last for less time before they reduce, but in the Veil Discord there has recently been a faucet channel that is giving out once per day, per user, directly onto a user’s requested stealth address, an entire block reward of Veil! That is 10 Veil per day if you do that simple command. With the Veil market running generally from 10 to 16 Bitcoin satoshis right now, this makes the Veil Discord faucet better than any other faucet I have seen, and is another great demonstration of Veil stealth or RingCT transactions. You wouldn’t know how much the faucet is currently paying unless you tried it yourself, or someone told you.
Presently, the devnet (development network for changes requiring concensus changes) is still 100% up and available for developers, as is the testnet (test network for testing any changes other than consensus changes). The devnet wallet is currently set to stake both RingCT utxos and light zerocoins. There is a current issue relating to the staked RingCT utxos, but it is not actively being worked on right now.
Be assured that unless a new proposed consensus upgrade is in every way an improvement to the current staking method we enjoy, it won’t be deployed. Also, please note that so long as the zerocoins you currently are staking with are minted from RingCT utxos, then they are still private. Veil’s staking and triple algo proof of work are well proven. Also, since a few months into 2019 it was firmly decided to retain proof of work for our Veil blockchain, having several benefits that we definitely do not want to give up.
With the Veil price still a bargain, there is not consistent pool support. Please let us know if the RandomX pool, fastpool.xyz/, or any others are still operating, or if WoolyPooly or another pool wish to resume running a mining pool. SHA256D is still solo CPU mining. No ASICs have been developed, but this would and will change with a much better Veil price, as incentives develop.
We would like to encourage people (and ourselves) to get active on all social media platforms such as:
More developers are coming in, but if you know of people who have an outstanding understanding of Applied Cryptography, ZK Proofs, zkSNARKs, and such things, like serious mathematicians, and have goals aligned with the Veil, cryptocurrency and Bitcoin community, they would be ideal candidates. We have a number of textbook PDFs for others who would like a refresher.
RingCT staking, while running on the development network is still awaiting some bug fixes and further rigorous testing.
The VEIL price and volume, is providing a fairly wide trading range, mostly between ten and sixteen satoshis, with Bitcoin having doubled its price. A couple of price spikes downward and upward, even ten times upward, on certain exchanges gave those who were prepared some pleasant surprises. Therefore the USD “value” of Veil has also improved, particularly at the upper end of the price range. That being said, there is a long way for the recovery to go, to sustain previous highs, which would be at least 20x to go back a couple of years, and then another ten or twenty fold to get to the mid-2019 levels, beyond which in a general bull market and an advance in the privacy coin arena would be unspeakably better.
Your input is valued in our DISCORD !
Veil-Dev, Discord: https://discord.gg/gGPcwxnSuR
Veil Project (English): https://t.me/VEILProject
(Please be aware of spam on Telegram and other third party websites. Our native community is on Discord.)
]]>Please check Veil Telegram groups such as the Bounty Telegram, and other places where community work on Veil may have been notified. Any questions, please let us know and we will look into whether some old Veil bounties remain relevant, and you may find some new ones.
“Ohcee” (Github name) received bounty for a second of his Veil GUI SETUP GUIDES Veil wallet installation for the GUI Veil core wallet. 2023-06-11 This is also linked from the Wallet download / Get Started page.
Veil-Dev, Discord: https://discord.gg/gGPcwxnSuR
Veil Project (English): https://t.me/VEILProject
(Please be aware of spam on Telegram and other third party websites. Our native community is on Discord.)
A 10,000 Veil bounty was paid to the indefatigable Veil enthusiast “VEILionaire | @veilminer007”! “@C0nt1ng3nt” came in a very worthy second, and received a 500 Veil bounty, while “Alex mail | @Alex_m_here” is offering his third place prize of 50 Veil (which we will double) to someone else who retweets and includes their Veil stealth address and follows his Twitter account and ours! It’s presently the pinned post on @ProjectVeil on Twitter — The exact tweet is here! Our favorite Veil meme artists are therefore currently VEILionaire and C0nt1ng3nt, with “Alex mail” providing enthusiastic support! 😀
With the Veil price still a bargain, there was not enough money in it for our appreciated former ProgPow pool WoolyPooly to keep supporting the coin. There was another pool that started not long ago for RandomX, fastpool.xyz/, remind us if there are any others! SHA256D is still solo CPU mining. No ASICs developed. This would and will change with a much better Veil price, as incentives would make it happen.
Results from Twitter have not been up to expectations, so we would like to encourage people (and this is a call to the Veil team also) to get active on other platforms such as:
More developers are coming in, but if you know of people who have an outstanding understanding of Applied Cryptography, ZK Proofs, zkSNARKs, and such things, like serious mathematicians, and have goals aligned with the Veil, cryptocurrency and Bitcoin community, they would be ideal candidates. We have a number of textbook PDFs for others who would like a refresher.
RingCT staking, while running on the development network is still awaiting some bug fixes and further rigorous testing.
The VEIL price and volume, last time checked on CoinGecko, there seems to be a bug in their data that suggests that not only there hasn’t been any volume for six days, (not true), that the price is $151.7 BILLION DOLLARS and the volume $207.6 million dollars! 🤪 Also NOT true!
On the other hand, on CoinMarketCap they are using PROBIT’s data, which in fact has days of zero volume, while TradeOgre’s price and volume is perfectly correct, just not what CoinGecko is currently showing you!
CoinGecko-priceError {Update: This error rarely happens. The CoinGecko price display is usually perfectly fine. See coingecko.com/en/coins/veil .}
Veil traders can, of course, check the Veil markets directly.
More exchanges are in the works. Suggest your favourite decentralised exchanges (DEX) in our DISCORD !
]]>You may have noticed that certain Veil Telegram groups have been reopened, including the Bounty Telegram. There may also be other places where old Veil bounties have been posted! Please check them out and we will look into whether they remain relevant.
“Ohcee” (Github name) received bounty for a new Ubuntu GUI SETUP GUIDE for the Veil core wallet. 2023-05-16 This is also linked from the Wallet download / Get Started page.
Veil-Dev, Discord: https://discord.gg/gGPcwxnSuR
Veil Project (English): https://t.me/VEILProject
(Please be aware of spam on Telegram and other third party websites. Our native community is on Discord.)
A 10,000 Veil bounty is on offer! Check @ProjectVeil on Twitter for more details! Follow the instructions carefully. This promo is active durng the month of May, and also includes nominating your favorite Veil meme or instructional post from April!
]]>I and many others are long-time proponents of using both Veil and Bitcoin as cash. A discussion has arisen in the Veil community of people sponsoring developers working on specific development projects, although this is applicable to any Veil Project role.
One commented that as we are “Veiliens” we would surely prefer all remuneration to be done using Veil. This should communicate our preference for and support of Veil as a currency, and certainly it is superior as a privacy coin, but there are some factors that unexpectedly, or ironically, as some would put it, work the opposite!
Let’s suppose that we are paying a developer who has no other source of income, not even welfare. So we know that he has to pay for food or he will starve, and for computer resources too. While some might suppose that any Veil that gets sold for food must have been bought. Buying and selling pressure should cancel each other out, but this is not going to be the case.
Let’s consider that this Veil is not being bought at the exact same time as the same amounts are being sold, in fact, as a Veilien you already have a bag of it, but we also believe that Veil needs to recover 100 to 1000 times its current value, so we will consider the demand and supply and market sentiment dynamics as they are after a 99.9% drop in the value.
Certainly, if Veil had continued its rise in 2019 from its regular trading in the five to seven thousand satoshi range, with a little-known all time high of ten or twenty thousand sats, Veil would certainly be trading comfortably in the multi-dollar range. 20,000 satoshis today, at the time of writing is $5.63. Well, if you are prepared to pay someone 100,000 Veil for some work, valued at $338.20 today, with a Veil price of 12 sats (since increased before posting this article), knowing that those one hundred thousand Veil should be worth TWENTY BITCOIN, or USD$564,236.20, and with a $100,000 Bitcoin, TWO MILLION DOLLARS, you would not want to part with that Veil knowing that they will be DUMPED on the market and probably not even get the $300 dollars worth of work you are expecting!
We see therefore that the Veilien above, by allowing those 100,000 Veil to be dumped on a weak market is not only communicating that they don’t think Veil should regain its all time high, but his or her action will only further depress the market.
It should also be noted that no Veil team member is receiving 100,000 Veil in a month for their work. So, let’s consider the opposite approach. Paying with a currency that has established value and a highly liquid market. That might be Bitcoin itself, or if the sponsor and the sponsored developer live in the same country, it might be their shared national fiat currency.
Before that, let’s consider a managed approach to using Veil as an incentive. The sponsor has the Veil already, as should be expected for a Veilien believer, so he pays the developer, and at the same time places buy orders for the full amount that the developer will need to sell for his or her essential needs. However low the sponsor places his buy orders is the maximum extractable value that the developer can likely instantly gain from the market, BUT there might be other sellers, and the developer might not manage to sell all of the sponsorship before the sponsor’s BIDs are all taken. So, the sponsor needs to bid for a greater amount of Veil or the value transfer from the sponsor to the developer may fail. This has inefficiencies, as the sponsor has to budget more than the value the developer will gain from the transaction, and both will have to play the market, distracting both from developing Veil.
Now, let’s consider the fiat sponsorship approach, much as we instinctively abhor and avoid fiat currencies. Assuming the sponsor and the sponsored both are able to use the given fiat currency, not at all certain these days, so long as there are no transaction fees, and no interference from banking or government agencies, the full value of the sponsorship will be enjoyed by the beneficiary of that sponsorship, and they will be able to put their full efforts into the necessary developments they have been hired to do. At the same time, the sponsor, a faithful Veilien, can hold on to their (more) valuable (to them) Veil, to be used when the product of the development work has been able to make Veil more popular. Furthermore, the developer seeing how they are improving the ecosystem, may be motivated to budget some percentage of their earnings, from the sponsorship or from other income, into buying some Veil for themselves! This will be Veil that does not get dumped on the market.
Now, I’m still in favour of using Veil, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and so on, as cash, it is necessary, when you expect a long term price recovery, to replace any amount that has been used for spending, knowing that when you spend what was, and should once again be, ten thousand dollars, but only receive five hundred dollars of value for it, if you really believe that, you will replace it the same day, as a matter of urgency.
Please join our Veil community. We hope you become a “Veilien” and see the merit in sponsoring a developer for the RingCT staking project, or for other projects within the Veil ecosystem, or sponsor or become a marketer. Don’t be too shy to attach your business name to the sponsorship, for example: “Bill’s Bicycle Boutique, sponsor of Sato’s She, Veil RingCT staking developer!”
[ Please note that this approach assumes that the current coin price is as a result of a deep bear market. It is highly likely that the opposite approach would be most popular in the heights of a bull market, where anyone wants to get their hands on the currency as a high priority. ]
]]>Veil release 1.3.0.0 completes RingCT light-wallet API necessary for private use of Veil in the Zelcore Desktop light wallet. Completion of the Ethereum Merge enables the Zelcore team to switch back to adding Veil to their multi-currency light wallet.
This will enable users who do not want to maintain a full node to hold Veil in their own custody, with their own private keys, and to use it privately through RingCT anonymous transactions.
The DAG-size reduction had to wait until after the 1.3.0.0 Veil core release to ensure that all of the popular ProgPoW mining software would support the reduction.
While the Veil mining community is eager to get started using mining GPUs with smaller memory before the existing code makes it impossible to mine, until we reach the deadline for the change those with larger GPUs, including former Ethereum miners are able to mine all the Veil they can possibly get!
The block height deadline for the 1.3.0.0 proof of work continuation is block two million, which should occur in the middle of November, maybe the 14th.
I suspect that we should give users another 100,000 blocks to install Veil core 1.4.0.0, making a deadline of block number 2,100,000. This, as well as the already released 1.3.0.0 is not only necessary for miners to upgrade, but for all users, exchanges, and services. If you still have Veil Core 1.2.4.1 before November, when you download 1.4.0.0, you will be able to skip 1.3.0.0. Just make sure to have updated to 1.3.0.0 or 1.4.0.0 by early November, and (assuming that we do give a later deadline for the next wallet) if you already have 1.3.0.0, then your 1.4.0.0 deadline will be about 9 weeks and 6 days later.
Have an opinion on this? Weigh in on Veil’s Discord server!
Following these updates, we should only need a mandatory update when we are able to change staking from zerocoin to RingCT.
Please check our updated exchanges page for information regarding our existing and pending exchanges and some that are no longer working! These include Graviex and CREX24. You should have no trouble dealing with Graviex.
]]>Veil release 1.3.0.0 completes RingCT light-wallet API necessary for private use of Veil in the Zelcore Desktop light wallet. (Further work is needed for inclusion in the Zelcore mobile wallet.)
Stay tuned for Zelcore’s release of Veil in their Zelcore desktop wallet!
This will enable users who do not want to maintain a full node to hold Veil in their own custody, with their own private keys, and to use it privately through RingCT anonymous transactions.
We have held off from including the DAG reduction in today’s release, because the most popular mining software was not yet ready, and the mining community preferred to wait a little longer.
The Veil mining community is excited and looking forward to using mining GPUs with smaller memory before the existing code makes it impossible to mine, and also hope to gain the attention of the miners with new and old GPUs who have been mining Ethereum as the end of Ethereum proof of work looms.
]]>At the Veil Project we consider all contributors to be part of the Veil family, whether an Original Generation team member, or one who joined us later, and they are very welcome to contribute again to Veil, whenever possible.
There are some staff who are no longer able to be involved as team members. codeofalltrades, dango and mados, we appreciate the work they have done, especially most recently, codeofalltrades, who has made significant contributions to the robustness of Veil’s core software. Cavespectre also has had to curtail his active development, as you may notice if checking Github.
While this blog has evidently been sadly neglected, it should change from this time onward. To catch up on other staff changes, please welcome us77ipis (Github ID) Johns5937 (on Discord) for his recent and ongoing contributions as an evidently motivated Bounty Developer. We are currently considering a reduction in the ProgPow DAG GPU memory size and are aware of arguments for and against this. If you would like to weigh in on the subject, please feel free to join our Discord mining channel, and/or our Veil-Dev Discord if you are able to contribute to writing code and testing submissions on our test and development networks.
Also please welcome Zannick. Although we have not yet got around to creating a staff page for him, he has been a developer in the team since 2021, contributed some important bug fixes, reviewing other devs’ code submissions, and is working on the future RingCT staking upgrade.
Steel97 (Github ID) IVAN (on Discord), also no staff profile page yet, should be recognised for his neat replacement of the Veil block explorers, which brings efficiency improvements.
Blondfrogs currently has a major upgrade in progress for the inclusion of Veil in the awesome Zelcore wallet. This is a light wallet, so it does not require the Veil user to maintain the full blockchain history on their own computer. Furthermore, Veil’s inclusion will be using RingCT anonymous transactions! When this is available, it will be announced in our NEWS updates. Although Blondfrogs is an OG Veil developer, this submission he is working on is done in his capacity as a developer for the Zelcore team, so he is not expected, although is very welcome, to do other regular contributions to Veil’s code.
]]>In late April, we received a report that alleged there was a vulnerability in the consensus validation of RingCT transactions. The Veil Dev Team spent a couple of weeks reviewing our code and were unable to determine how an attacker could execute a double spend.
On Thursday, May 6th, we received a proof-of-concept script, and spent the evening validating and testing and getting to the bottom of how it was functioning. It required modifications to the source code on the attacker wallet, and also required the attacking wallet to mine or stake a block. We found an old commented out section of code and suspected that may have been the error, but putting it back in place did not resolve the vulnerability.
On Friday, May 7th, we implemented and verified a fix for the vulnerability, added logging so we could monitor the chain, and chose a block for Sunday May 9th to begin enforcing and rejecting any blocks that contained such an attack. On Saturday morning we added the protocol enforcement code for Sunday May 16th, and fast tracked a release of this code as version 1.2.0.
After the vulnerability enforcement took effect, on Monday May 10th, we found a block that had forked the chain. However, it had only forked part of the v1.2.0 nodes and not all. After intensive investigation we noticed two things; First that there was an errant assert in the new code, which had issues [still to be investigated] with some older blocks, and more importantly, that the initial code that we found commented out had slipped into the changes we made.
That commented out section of code was checking if the mempool contained a transaction with the same RingCT input as a transaction in a block being verified. While the transaction in the mempool was not accepted into any block, it still caused issues when a v1.2.0 node was verifying a block and had that other transaction in their mempool.
Monday evening, we changed the assert to a log message so that we can investigate it further in the future, added some necessary code to the RPC calls in order to aid investigation for both that mempool issue, and the actual vulnerability, and removed the code that caused blocks to be rejected when they had a legitimate RingCT transaction with a duplicate transaction in the mempool. This became v1.2.1.
On Monday evening we also completed a script to walk backwards through the chain and search for any blocks that contained the attack signature. This script, as of 17:00 GMT Sunday, May 16th, has analyzed close to a half million blocks, over 11 months back so far, and not one block has shown the signature of the vulnerability. We will continue to monitor the progress of this script over the next couple weeks, until it finishes its analysis, and update the community upon the completed analysis.
I want to personally thank CodeOfAllTrades for his focus and hard work during all of this investigation as well as the rest of the team for respecting my wishes of letting us focus on the solution while they jumped in to notify exchanges and inform the community. I would also like to thank the community for being understanding and trusting to install a release when we were withholding the source code for the release. I tip my hat to the exchanges that jumped at not just one emergency upgrade, but two. Last and nowhere close to least, I would like to thank, on behalf of myself, the Veil team, our community as a whole, and the unnamed individual that brought this issue to our attention.
Now that we have passed the protocol enforcement date, the public repo will soon be loaded with the code changes made privately, and we will re-open merging of public PRs.
]]>How did you get started with cryptocurrency?
When I first read the Bitcoin whitepaper I was a bit interested, but skeptical about this currency based on cryptography, not gold! I tried compiling a wallet for the first time, but found myself in dependency hell and gave up despite the offer of a free bitcoin for anyone who would get a node up for launch in January 2009. However, I kept reading the email list until I looked at a laissez-faire market called The Silk Road.
I thought it was going to be great, but was instantly turned off by the particular goods and services I discovered there. Losing interest, I unsubscribed.
I nearly forgot about Bitcoin until November 2017 when I emerged from the jungles of South America not having heard anything of the rise of Bitcoin or the existence of Ethereum or any other project! I went for a couple of weeks to Thailand and saw a Bitcoin ATM! Back in Australia the nightly news was reporting on Bitcoin prices like it was on par with the stock market and precious metals!
I went to a Bitcoin seminar in a church, where they explained that not only was Bitcoin not the Mark of the Beast, but explained how to set up a wallet, join exchanges, and buy on LocalBitcoins. They also talked about making a fortune on Ripple as it went from 5¢ to 30¢ in a few weeks, and Bitcoin was $15,000 and headed surely for $30,000 and higher. Clif High and John McAfee were cited as prescient gurus. People gave knowing looks, claiming insider knowledge that Litecoin was about to boom too. Even Bitconnect and Cloud Mining was promoted! The smart money was in mining, they said.
It took a couple of weeks to get verified onto CoinBase, so I meanwhile signed up to every exchange I possibly could, and bought BTC on LocalBitcoins for over $20,000 USD, spent thousands on Cloud Mining, and lost thousands on the Davor Coin interest-paying crypto scam and numerous other loss-making projects. I bought Litecoin, that then crashed, and I stop-lossed back into BTC, bought a bunch of XRP, and pretty much wiped out much of my life savings and the proceeds from the sale of my house. Convinced, I was, that this was just the beginning. I spent day and night studying crypto and trading from time to time, profitable during my short trading stints, putting yet another $40K in each time, but my investment bags leaked badly in the subsequent long HODLs.
What initially drew you towards digital currency?
I had always been interested in economics, free enterprise, and sound money, having seen the stagflation of the 1970s and growing up poor. When visiting the United States in the late 1980s I converted my money to one ounce gold bullion coins. A decade later I sold them for a similar price. Having had a loan on my house at well over ten percent per annum, I realized that those ten coins in ten years had cost me their entire worth in excessive interest I had had to pay because of not having that much less borrowed against my house!
Having been on the Internet since the mid-1990s, and having earlier read books warning about coming economic catastrophes, I found myself joining like-minded email groups exploring virtual nations, virtual economies, and even signing up to The Free State Project.
That’s how I found gold-backed digital currencies such as E-gold, Goldmoney, and others I will not mention here. We had some grand plans and projects that were becoming more and more successful: virtual stock exchanges and the virtual companies being traded on there; all of it was not based on pumping the price of the underlying gold, but on converting more and more economic activity to be based on easily and instantly tradeable electronic gold account balances. We felt safe in the knowledge that in the long run gold is immune to the inflation that allows governments and large corporations to steal from the hard working and honest traders, savers, and ordinary workers. This was continuing fine until one day the FBI raided E-gold and tore the heart and the blood out of the economy on the pretext that some tiny percentage of users of E-gold were alleged to be using the money for illegal activity.
Can you tell us a little about your working background?
I have worked with computers since the mid-1980s, increasingly working in technical support, and network administration.
At what point did you decide working in the digital currency field was for you?
As I was already spending twelve or sixteen hours per day immersed in the crypto world and using computers it made sense for me to take on work in a project based on building a digital equivalent of the cash economy—something based on actual work and not just betting on markets and on moon boys tricking the noobs into giving them all their money in exchange for bags of hopium. Sure, I could also do some trading, but never as much as had cost me dearly in 2018. I just happened to be helping people who had problems, without thought of payment, when I was noticed and got recommended into the Veil Project team.
What big changes to approaches and attitudes have you witnessed in your time following digital currencies?
At first, there were only custodial accounts with a company or someone who held gold or had it stored on your behalf. Sadly those have come unstuck when the gold or silver has been stolen or confiscated.
Next there were also currencies backed by the backed digital gold, but those also fell victim to the same loss of backing.
Also of interest were earlier efforts at community currencies in Local Exchange Trading System, not backed by precious metals, but backed by work done by people in a close community. All these systems relied on traditional client-server databases and had no decentralization about them whatsoever.
Maybe these “L.E.T.S.” (currencies with no hard asset backing) and fiat (declared value) currencies helped prepare people for the next leap: a currency backed by an unconfiscatable something, proved by advanced mathematics, and decentralized so there would be no single or central point vulnerable to attack.
In the few years since 2017 we’ve seen a splintering of efforts as some pursue “programmable money” and numerous tangential goals changed a singular cryptocurrency into scores of differently focused projects and hundreds, even thousands, of copycats, Ponzi, and other confidence schemes remaining a trap for all newcomers.
As decentralized cryptocurrency has been adopted now by thousands and even millions of people another threat has emerged. While they can no longer steal the backing of competing currencies, governments and monied interests turned their efforts to tracking everything people were doing with their bitcoin, beginning to turn an unstoppable digital currency into a key element of global and individual control!
While there already existed some projects aiming to free cryptocurrency users from surveillance and slavery, there were flaws, such as having to make extra efforts to achieve the promised privacy, leaving the path of least resistance, the same lack of privacy that Bitcoin users had discovered they were subject to. The Veil Project in 2018 began original work to create a currency that achieves privacy by default, where the default settings make your currency and transactions private, no optional extras required.
Your work with Veil ranges from QA to user support. What would you say have been the biggest sticking points for users? Where have you personally seen the biggest improvements?
I think the most challenging issues Veil users have struggled with have involved how much larger and slower zerocoins are to transact with in their wallets and on the blockchain. Also, the assumption that the Veil wallet will be just like any other (non-privacy coin) wallet can lead to people doing things such as running identical duplicate wallets on multiple computers, where the encryption of transactions in Veil causes the wallets to appear to lose coins that one of the clones has spent or minted into zerocoins. Veil’s development roadmap will be solving these issues.
From a privacy perspective, the biggest challenge may be that people give up some of their privacy when dealing with exchanges as they buy or sell VEIL. We need to expand the Veil ecosystem into person-to-person exchanges and merchants who directly accept and use veil as currency.
Changing gear, what is it you love doing in your spare time?
In recent years I seem to have sacrificed much of my “spare” time, but being out in peaceful countryside, riding a nice cruiser motorbike, or just driving or riding a bicycle to keep fit are things that are important to me. I used to sing a lot. I even had my own music radio program, back in the day.
Reading physical books was a major thing, before the Internet. I got back into reading a decade ago when I had some commuting time coinciding with the release of the iPad, but it’s hard for me to concentrate on things other than crypto, and YouTube videos of travel, bikes, aviation, and science. Back in the day I have enjoyed some nice big Russian novels. It would be great to get that kind of concentration back again. Many more I haven’t yet read.
You’re a proud Australian. Do you think originating from the ‘island continent’ has given you any unique views?
Coming from semi-rural Australia, I have a strong appreciation of nature, clean air, and tranquility.
I have to ask: Sydney or Melbourne?
I have ancestral connections in Sydney and Melbourne and many other places around Australia, but I am from Victoria, outside Melbourne.
Where do you see the future of digital services going from here? Have things unfolded the way you’d have imagined in the past?
We’ve had a lot of promises and dreams. While some technologies progress slowly and all of a sudden appear, others seem to be moving at a mind-blowing pace all the time. The mainstream community takes a long time to adopt these developments. A few years ago, I thought we were right at the cusp of a crypto money revolution, but on much deeper inspection it hasn’t all been realized yet. However, public awareness of cryptocurrency is an order of magnitude better than it was at the previous peak at the end of 2017.
Outside of Veil, any other crypto project or influencers you’re fond of?
I don’t think it will surprise you at all that one of the most valuable influencers I know is Naomi Brockwell (Twitter), with her highly knowledgeable grasp of crypto and privacy technology and issues as well as her all-round delightfulness!
Another nice and well-informed guy for crypto news is Omar Bham! (Twitter I can’t say his name without an exclamation mark! ;) Most famous for his crypt0snews channel.
Other projects I admire. DigiByte! They deserve even more credit than they are given. A lot of great technologies are in DigiByte.
Cardano! Charles Hoskinson has led an amazing project over quite a few years, and I’m looking forward to it being taken very seriously.
Bitcoin Cash! One has to be brave to appreciate a project that cops a lot of flak (from competitors), but Roger Ver’s dedication to market adoption is second to none. However, people like Hayden Otto are following closely in his footsteps.
I also admire many others: teams working on or toward decentralized exchanges; projects with a great user experience, such as some very slick and beautiful wallets (Exodus, Atomic Wallet, ZelCore); and projects with well thought out features that they didn’t just copy from generic cookie-cutter projects. Too many to mention! (Apologies to people and teams who know that I know them, but I still didn’t mention them!)
Sean can be found on the Veil Discord server and on Twitter.
]]>With 2020 behind us and a new year before us, it’s once again time the Veil team give a peek behind the curtain. This article covers some of the larger development objectives of 2021. Note that these items aren’t necessarily in any particular order, and that we’ll have more information on their release as time progresses.
Presently the Veil wallet allows users to stake their held veil using a shaved down version of the Zerocoin protocol. While Zerocoin once provided users with privacy, the unfortunate surfacing of an exploit in 2019 meant Veil had to take measures to remove the vulnerability. This led to the loss of privacy from the Zerocoin protocol, and the reliance on RingCT, formerly Veil’s secondary privacy measure, as its key privacy protocol. With the upcoming 1.2 version update staking will move to RingCT. This will once again provide Veil users with privacy for their staking balance without first taking multiple time-consuming steps. (Those steps presently being to first convert funds to RingCT, mint them to Zerocoin, and then stake). The simplicity this update will bring also means far less time spent waiting for coins to mature as they move between coin types to stake. It also means far more coins will be held in RingCT, greatly improving both the privacy and speed with which RingCT transactions take place.
Presently Veil operates with four different coin types in order to achieve all of the wallets operations: Zerocoin stakes, RingCT transacts privately, basecoins are used for mining rewards and exchange transactions, and CT serves as a necessary intermediary for RingCT and basecoin under the current system. This system is not ideal—particularly as Zerocoin is no longer private—as it produces needless user friction, complicates the UI, and slows operations. For this reason, all operations in release version 1.2 will take place primarily in RingCT.
The shift to RingCT will inevitably require balances that exist in other coin types to be migrated to RingCT. A lot of hard work is being done to ensure as much of this process is automated and as pain-free for users as possible. We will also give users adequate time to manage their own funds in preparation for the 1.2 hard fork when the time comes.
Once the consolidation takes place, the simplification of coin types will open the way for easier UX/UI, easier implementation on exchanges and platforms, and deliver to users the overall smoother privacy experience for which we strive.
Veil X is something we’ve teased in 2020, and something we’ve had a very positive reaction to.
Veil X is a unique, custom-built wallet GUI for Veil with a number of user-focused features. It was built by industry veterans Makalu, incorporating their years of experience and expertise while also considering feedback from the Veil team and community.
Veil X is designed specifically for version 1.2 and RingCT so their releases will coincide closely. More features are planned for Veil X in the future, one of which can be read about in the next section.
A shared back-end server, VLS functions similarly to a block explorer, though it uses its own communication protocol to communicate with clients.
VL S is not a top priority presently, but as it supplements upcoming releases it is safe to assume it will become one once version 1.2 is released.
The Veil Core wallet has steadily been receiving updates and quality of life improvements for as long as it’s existed. The frequency of those improvements picked up in the latter half of 2020, with many bugs squashed and improvements under the hood.
In 2021, these improvements will continue, and will become more noticeable as we consolidate to RingCT. We’re also thrilled to announce the addition of a new Core developer to the Veil team, WetOne, a well-rounded developer made official following his successful contributions as a bounty developer. WetOne has already contributed to the Qt wallet in the latest release, and will continue to improve upon it in the near future.
While it’s unlikely these improvements will receive dedicated articles, they will be mentioned in release notes and version announcement articles, so keep your eyes peeled!
Luxgate (by LuxCore) is a partnership Veil have been fostering for some time. Currently in alpha, Luxgate is a decentralized exchange platform that does away with many of the inconveniences and privacy concessions of other exchanges.
Luxgate does not require accounts, sets no limits, and takes no fees. It also provides decentralized books and matching for orders, making it a true decentralized exchange platform (DEX).
To view Luxgate’s alpha demo, visit here.
Privacy is best achieved through multiple layers obscuring your identity and actions, e.g. there’s no use wearing a mask if you’re wearing a nametag. The Dandelion++ protocol specifically targets one area of vulnerability in a digital transaction: the network IP address origin of a transaction. It does this by diffusing the transaction’s broadcast across the network.
Learn more about Dandelion and the Dandelion++ protocol visit this page.
Note that the nature of Dandelion broadcasting introduces many small delays to obscure the transaction. This will result in slightly longer transaction times. We will bring more information on this in the future.
Currently, it appears Dandelion can be updated without the use of a hard fork, so whether the protocol will be introduced with the release of version 1.2 or soon after has not yet been determined. Expect confirmation closer to release.
Exchanges
2021 will also see renewed effort in finding fitting exchanges to list Veil—particularly after the 1.2 update. The update prerequisite drastically simplifies the listing and maintenance processes for exchanges, so we ask you all to temper expectations at least until then.
With the above stated, Veil’s listing on TradeOgre exchange in the latter part of 2020 proved a boon for the project and community alike. If you have an exchange you would like us to look into, please feel free to mention it to the team and we’ll be sure to look into it.
Communication
The community’s communication survey feedback was very positive. It’s very clear the monthly updates, GitHub visibility bot, and other avenues of communication with the community are greatly appreciated. We will continue bringing you these and more throughout 2021.
Marketing
In 2020 Veil leaned on cautious, focused marketing as we worked hard on the version 1.1 wallet. The release of 1.1 greatly improved key areas such as the PoW mining overhaul and the orphan pruning measures. We subsequently saw in an influx of new miners exposed to Veil through our efforts with WoolyPooly mining pools and WhatToMine.
We will continue to assess and pursue marketing opportunities throughout the year.
When will 1.2 release?
We do not yet have a release window and prefer not to make estimates until we’re quite certain everything is ready to go. Keep an eye on Veil news for more information in the future.
Will version 1.2 have X feature?
There will of course be updates that have not been mentioned in this article. Feel free to check progress on Veil’s GitHub though note not all work is currently public. Feel free to make a feature request issue on GitHub if there is something you hope to see in version 1.2, although it doesn’t guarantee its addition.
Will Veil be on X exchange?
As mentioned in this article, any exchange recommendations are welcome. Feel free to contact the team via social media or on Discord to let us know about your favorite exchange.
We hope you’re as excited about the developments we have in store for 2021 as we are working on them. We’ll be bringing you some in-depth articles focusing exclusively on some of the above topics in the near future.
As always, we welcome any discussion or questions over social or on our Discord server.
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